ZANESVILLE - A year after their mother, Dr. Cassandra McDonald, passed away, Nathaniel and Benjamin McDonald continue her passionate work to educate and nurture kids with autism in Zanesville.

In 2012, Dr. McDonald founded the C.A.S.S. M.I.N.D. Academy, an autistic learning center with a focus on education, arts, culture and business.

"My mother always catered to students with disabilities," Nathaniel said.

"Her vision was really to provide for these folks, really reaching out to people and making a connection, specifically with the under-served populations," Benjamin said.

After Cassandra passed away in November 2017, her sons took over leadership of the academy.

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Dr. Cassandra McDonald passed away in November 2017. Her sons, Nathaniel and Benjamin McDonald, continue her passionate work to educate and nurture kids with autism in Zanesville.(Photo: Times Recorder file photo)

The school places an emphasis on specialized curriculum for each of its students, as well as educating them on social and communication skills. The school operates similarly to a regular school, with six-and-a-half hour days five days a week. There are classes for language arts, math, science and social studies, as well as art, music and life skills.

Students also met with a Cindy Henceroth, a social worker, and Christian Jones, a behavior specialist, throughout the week to help guide them and create individualized education programs for each student.

"Nathan has a really great understanding of Mom's original vision," Benjamin said.

Since taking over, the brothers have been looking to expand the program. Just a few years ago, the program had three students; this school year, there are 14 enrolled.

"This year has been a fascinating year for C.A.S.S.-M.I.N.D. Academy. (Nathaniel and Benjamin) have started to really open it up," said Dan Howard, one of the intervention specialists overseeing the students during the school day. "We're getting a lot more students in, we're getting a lot more equipment and able to spruce up around here and increase our ability through technology."

The higher student count, with students ranging in age from 4 to 17, helps the children learn to interact with other age groups.

School administrators are looking to take in more students in order to get charter school status; that would give them access to busing.

"We've got families that are coming from Cambridge to bring their children here," Henceroth said. "I've got three students traveling out that way."

The school has also expanded its staff from three people to nine, and added speech pathology and occupational therapy this year.

Teaching autism

A typical school day at the academy flows similarly to any public school. On Thursday, the older students, downstairs in the living room, dining room and kitchen, started off with morning work and an hour-and-a-half block of Language Arts. Howard taught the 8- and 9-year-olds spelling, while Natasha Kolencin, another intervention specialist, had a reading session with the teenagers. After a short break, the students moved on into math for an hour before lunch.

Upstairs, some of the younger children were learning about the idea of different-sized objects, while others were playing with building blocks.

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Jamie Block reads a book to the younger students at the C.A.S.S.-M.I.N.D. Academy.(Photo: Nathan Harris/Times Recorder)

The autism aspect, however, adds a whole other element to any school day.

"Sharing is a tough thing for any 5-year-old, but then you add autism in there and not understanding the dynamic of empathy and that other students have likes and feelings too," Henceroth said. "Cooperation is a huge goal for all kids, but especially kids at this age, to be a good classmate and a good friend, to learn that this other boy here has feelings, too."

Occasionally, a student may act out.

Autism is classified as a behavioral disorder among the medical community. Many of the students have stemming behaviors, repetitive movements such as spinning around or lining things up that soothe them, compensating for a lack of ability to express themselves emotionally.

"We had one student who tried to pull down the Christmas tree (in the foyer). To other people it would be odd. He just weren't feeling good and didn't know how to communicate that," Jones said. "That's a big thing that we focus on here, teaching them how to explain what's going on rather than showing it through anger or aggression or frustration or acting it out."

In her meetings with the students, Jones tries to assess the various triggers for each student.

"A lot of them have sensory issues or don't react well to loud noises," she said. "The majority of the time they don't know how to communicate what's wrong, and it could be something as simple as the student next to them tapping their pencil."

The behavioral issues can affect academic growth as a result. A student may be in the eighth grade by age, but may be reading at a fourth-grade level, Henceroth said. One new student is 4 years old but does not talk yet.

Escape into art

As a fashion designer, Nathaniel has a predilection toward promoting and encouraging artistic expression, as a means of not only communicating and connecting with a student, but also unlocking their potential.

"Some students with autism are non-verbal, so music is a way of reaching out to them," he said as an example.

In November, students from the school held an art show at Weasel Boy Brewing Company, one of Nathaniel's ideas for special projects. The students debuted pieces of colorful pop art made in the style of Andy Warhol, who some experts have argued was also partially autistic.

Some had traced their hand in various positions on colored paper, while others had colored in a pixelated picture of a frog on graph paper, all of them backed by a complementing piece of colored paper and duplicated four times. Students also individually created artistic interpretations of road signs and worked together to make a large mosaic tree out of construction paper, with a rainbow of leaves and a variety of patterns running down its trunk.

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Nathaniel McDonald and Cindy Henceroth, the social worker and art therapist at the C.A.S.S.-M.I.N.D. Academy, pose with some of the students' art at Weasel Boy Brewing Company.(Photo: Nathan Harris/Times Recorder)

"Some of the students really respond well to art," said Henceroth, who is also an art therapist at the school. "I have one student with A.D.H.D who has difficulty focusing in class, but when it comes to art, they really hone in."

On Friday, Henceroth incorporated what the younger students had been learning about for the past two weeks, shapes and sizes, into a lesson on the work of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. The older students had learned about Kwanza, so they worked on African-American printmaking.

The art pieces were on display on the wall around Weasel Boy throughout November and December, as well as self-portraits some of the students had make earlier in the year. They plan to hold another art show at the Zanesville Museum of Art on Jan.19, as well as one at the Muskingum County Library System in June.

Hands-on from afar

Nathaniel and Benjamin are not typically present for day-to-day operations at the school; Nathaniel, known for his appearance as a contestant in Season 10 of Project Runway, is a fashion designer living in New York, while Benjamin is an electrical engineer living in Cleveland.

The two are frequently traveling to Zanesville at least once a month to visit the school and the students, however, and hold teleconferences with staff every Friday.

"There's not a day that has gone by that I haven't been in communication with someone at the school," Benjamin said.

Nathaniel came into town in November as the students debuted their work at Weasel Boy, helping to hang the work up on the walls and entertain the students who were excited to show off their pieces.

Their physical distance from Zanesville has not stopped Nathaniel and Benjamin from getting to know each student individually, as one might know their own children.

"Part of the perception (of autism) is, folks will assume that they don't learn at the same speed of others and they'll just look at the issues they have with learning, and not take the time to understand how they learn," Benjamin said. "Mom didn't want these kids to just fall into how society classified them. 'Society says I can't do this, society says I can't do that,' and she would say 'Well, what can you do?' She wanted to empower them."

"These kids, they're so amazing," Nathaniel said, tearing up as he talked about the perception of autism in society, "I just want the world to see what they can do and what they can be."